Innovation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, May 11, 2013, 20:11 (4013 days ago) @ dhw


> dhW: As you well know, I do not believe or disbelieve my panpsychist version, and you are quite right to be incredulous. But perhaps you could explain to me HOW ELSE your own version might work. The invention of new organs is linked, we believe, to random changes in the environment. -Those inventions cannot be linked to to random changes!!! That is the key issue between us. I've used the liver because it is a highly complex organ, actually more complex than a free-living amoeba. In the Cambrian alimentary tubes for injestion of food appeared. Nothing before was anything like this: just hollow sacks, or bilateral sacks which absorbed by osmosis very simple nutrients in the sea water. The Cambrian had very complex preditors which chomped up complicated prey, that required differential digestion. Thus a liver had to be arranged to aid in that complex digestion. -I apologize for not being this explicit in my goading you with the liver. I expected you to make a logical jump for which you don't have the background. The liver has to be designed specifically to fill this role. Trial and error would not have sufficed. As the Cambrian animals appeared with all their organs and parts, basically from no credible precursors, each of the organs had to also appear de novo. That is the Cambrian dillemma for Darwinism. It cannot work by itty-bitty advances. No matter how bright your imagined cells are, they could not conjure up a liver by cooperation. They had to have a whole outlined architectural plan in their DNA from the beginning.-
> dhw: Does his infinite intelligence hone in telekinetically on the chosen few, or does he take them to his great lab in the sky, or merely say "Let there be livers..."? (My question is serious.)-More than likely livers are entirely and carefully planned.
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> dhw: Evolution therefore progresses in accordance with how these intelligences respond to environmental conditions, either adapting or innovating through cooperation. Hence the bush, which grows as and when these intelligences come up with their innovations. Neither by chance nor by central organization.-I've explained how wrong this statement has to be.
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> DAVID: Evolution looks a lot more organized to me with a central drive toward more complexity.
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> No, I'm describing intelligent response to chance changes.-I know, and there is no way it can work except with a comprehensive plan and a major jump as in punctuated equilibrium. And who provided the complete intact plan?
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> dhw: That is because you believe in a God with a purpose. The drive towards complexity is clear.
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> DAVID: The drive to complexity is 'clear' because evolution reeks of teleology.
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> dhw: I meant that it was clear because we can all see that it happened. My panpsychist hypothesis allows for teleology, in so far as every innovation has a purpose. But your teleology, of course, is divine.-Teleology is not enough among disparate cells. The plan has to be there in advance.- Dawin quotes on point:-"If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory to descent with slow modification though natural selection."-"Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer."
 
"The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained."-As usual Darwin was a clear thinker. His fawning acolytes are not.